At a board meeting held last Thursday, the Garfield High School PTSA board adopted a resolution calling for the removal of military recruiters from high school campuses in Seattle. “We didn’t arrive at this decision lightly,” said co-chair Amy Hagopian. ” Our PTSA has been studying this issue for several months. We had a forum at our general meeting in March, with a panel of experts on the topic, and we heard from the broad range of families at Garfield, many of whom have older children in the military.” The resolution states, in part, “There are many reasons why Garfield parents, teachers and students might object to military recruiting on campus. Not all of us agree on every issue. Whether it is because of a desire to protect young students from the life-and-death decision that military service presents, objection to the current war in Iraq, fear that recruiters may not present a realistic picture of military life or disagreement with policies that discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation, we do agree that public schools are not a place for military recruiters.” In the debate on the issue at the meeting on Thursday, a compelling argument was made that increasingly desperate recruiters seem to be misrepresenting sign-up agreements in order to lure recruits. Under Section 9528 of the “No Child Left Behind” Act, school districts are required to release to recruiters the names and contact information of all high school students. On-campus recruitment guidelines in Seattle are set at the school level, with each career center defining its own limits on recruitment. This spring, Garfield’s career center director, Karin Engstrom, limited recruiters to one day per month, and only during the lunch period, when she can supervise. Some colleges, such as Yale University, have been successful in refusing to cooperate with recruiters, despite the 1995 “Solomon Amendment” that threatens to withhold federal funds from schools that fail to cooperate with military recruiters. The Yale Law School faculty sued to protect the school from this threat, on the grounds that since the military refused to sign Yale’s non-discrimination policy, the university was not obligated to assist the military in recruitment. The faculty won that suit in February. Garfield’s PTSA voted to oppose an invasion of Iraq in the fall of 2002, under the belief that the war would be a threat both to the well-being of students who may be called to fight in it, as well as a threat to the funding security of public education.
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